How to Completely Disable Spotlight

We’re big fans of Spotlight here at OS X Daily, but we realize it’s not everyones cup of tea. If you’re someone who dislikes Spotlight enough to want it disabled completely then this is the guide for you. What you’ll need is some basic knowledge of the command line and a command line text editor (we’ll use nano in this example, perhaps the easiest). Note that some other Mac OS X features and programs are based on Spotlight’s search abilities, therefore some applications could behave abnormally if you disable Spotlight, particularly in search functions.

These directions below are intended for older versions of OS X, including 10.4 and 10.5. Newer versions of Mac OS X have better, more direct ways of disabling the Spotlight search functionality, typically with just a single command entered into the Terminal. Users of more modern versions of OS X are recommended to use those, this for Snow Leopard, and here for Mavericks, Mountain Lion, and Lion. The instructions below for prior versions of Mac OS X are included for posterity as they continue to be relevant to machines that are not able to run the most recent versions available.

Disabling Spotlight

Launch Terminal and type the following: sudo nano /etc/hostconfig

Navigate using the arrow keys down the following entry: SPOTLIGHT=-YES-

Change SPOTLIGHT=-YES- to SPOTLIGHT=-NO-

Save /etc/hostconfig by hitting Control-O and the return key, next hit Control-X to exit the nano editor

Next, you’ll want to disable the index by typing the following in the Terminal:mdutil -i off /

And to erase the current Spotlight index, type: mdutil -E /

That’s pretty much it, on your next reboot, Spotlight will be completely disabled.

Re-Enable Spotlight

If you want to enable Spotlight again, follow the same steps as above, but change SPOTLIGHT=-NO- to SPOTLIGHT=-YES-

and then type mdutil -i on / in the Terminal

Reboot, and Spotlight is back as usual

Disable Spotlight in OS X 10.5

To turn off Spotlight in Leopard, use this trick:

Move these two files to another safe location and then reboot your mac

39 Comments

THANKS! so nice to get my cpu back. Some simple minded users might not understand why not to use spotlight, here is why:

For two days my machine has been CRAWLING, nearly unusable. Turns out that it was all spotlight trying to index a little over 20TB of email backups on an array I had just connected. For people like myself who work with large RAID arrays containing large amounts of data Spotlight will nearly disable your system.

You might want to turn off spotlight for a couple of reasons.
1. performance, removing spotlight overhead on a low-end system
2. privacy, making it more difficult for a script to harvest personal information

So I’ve gone through with this and for some reason spotlight just won’t go away. I’ve done it for the root drive and also my two external partitions, just modifying the / on the end to a /volumes/etc. It is still in my menu bar and when I accidentally click on it mds kicks in and starts taking up 80-90% of my cpu power. After I kill mds it’s all fine, but it’s bothersome to think that I didn’t actually get rid of it. My /etc/hostconfig reads NO for spotlight upon opening. Any suggestions?

The easy way to disable spotlight is by setting its preference to prevent from searching on certain folder (or HD or external HD if any) on the Privacy Tab and uncheck all category on Search Result tab. It will stop indexing immediatelly.

“why would you possibly want to turn off spotlight, the best feature in osx??”

Because it’s a piece of dook. What is the point of a search function that doesn’t show you WHERE THINGS ARE? I don’t know where Apple gets its designers, but they have to be amongst the biggest morons in professional development. Who else would design a display of search results that doesn’t show a LOCATION with every hit?

Right, retard. It makes a lot of sense to have to click on every damned item, one at a time, to see a path. After all, who’d want to quickly scan through a list and skip hits that reside in known irrelevant locations?

I want to remove it because the shortcuts suck.
Every time I’m in other app and type space command to get to whatever option in the app I use it jumps to stupid spotlight and since I do a lot blind I notice late and have to start over.

Also those of us that keep our houses clean tend to know where files are, after all you save them somewhere, simply label your files correctly and put them in organised folders, in my twenty years of using macs or pcs I have never lost a file or needed to search for it.
Why run with all that overhead for no reason ?

So to get back to the point does adding the main system drive to spotlights privacy list free up as much performance as disabling it in terminal ?

As interface designer i am allowed to agree, Spotlight totally sucks for some people.
Normally we replicate a lot off apple standards, because they are simple and work.
But with spotlight, i really don’t get the idea, its radically boiled down to a simplicity which is for me totally useless.

waah i disabled it in 10.5 by moving the two plist files as above (i just wanted to prevent reindexing during migration assistant) but now that i’ve put them back it’s still not working even though the files are there… any idea what I do now?

waah i disabled it in 10.5 by moving the two plist files as above (i just wanted to prevent reindexing during migration assistant) but now that i’ve put them back it’s still not working even though the files are there… any idea what I do now?

I did the same thing with the plist files trying to improve the audio latency with GarageBand. Yes, and I put them back and now I can’t get Spotlight working again either.

[…] Since mdworker is part of Spotlight, you’ll have to disable Spotlight to disable mdworker. Again, this is not recommended, but if you want to disable mdworker here’s a how-to guide: How to Disable Spotlight […]

I had the same error last night. “could not set indexing status for volume.” turned out to be major mess of the directory structure of the hard disk. I’m now restoring from a backup after formatting the hard disk.
I did install the drive patch that came a few days ago. Hmmm, maybe it’s related?

If you do you get a ‘Smart Folder’, and can sort the entries by name, type, and date. The whole setup seems most useful, and it’s hard to fault the design.

As for Darren’s “noisier and cooler”, I should think most of us hardly know we’ve got a drive – my 250Gb just provides an infinite amount of space and stays shtum. And I can find any text, anywhere.

You do need to turn off Spotlight sometimes, though. I was very puzzled, on mounting a 16Gb USB stick and dumping the world onto it, to see it ticking away for ever after I’d finished with it. This was the mighty Spotlight patiently repeating all its useful work on a slow device.

I hate to disable it completely, but it keeps crashing on usb flash drive usage. I have tried it on over 30 separate macs.
Terrible flaw in the system I think, and yet there is no way to completely disable indexing on flash drives, because every flash drive will read differently when plugged in, so the privacy tab is useless in that regard.
oh well, it’s not disabled, hope this helps.

[…] turned into spotlight. Spotlight is great at finding stuff (if you have a powerful computer if not, turn it off since it is a memory hog. But what if I don’t want to search through every folder or scroll […]

Looks like that config file – hostconfig – is going away … in 10.7 – that is on or after about 10.7.4 or later. It is still there, but there are no spotlight options – pity.

I do not like some random (even from Apple) program indexing everything on my computer… you hook a random USB drive and the system can go nuts. This is dumb, dumb, dumb. There should be more kill/disable options in the GUI/System Preferences —- or even via CLI, but it appears this info is out of date.

The OLD FIND FILE was awesome, fast and reliable – and IIRC – did not require any indexing. I know regular uses may like SpotLight, but SL is about 3 steps backwards – or bassawkards or many others.